What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Turtle Warrior
Mary Relindes Ellis · 384 pages
"A luminous debut novel....A deeply spiritual book." -San Francisco ChronicleThe Turtle Warrior is the story of the Lucas family, who live in a beautiful and remote part of Wisconsin inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe. By 1967 the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons. When the eldest, James,
Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko · 262 pages
"This story, set on an Indian reservation just after World War II, concerns the return home of a war-weary Navaho young man. Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other ret
The Honk and Holler Opening Soon
Billie Letts · 305 pages
The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam
Bao Ninh · 228 pages
The Sorrow of War - by turns bleak and poetic, pellucid and cunning - opens with Kien, an infantry cadre from Hanoi, engaged in the grim business of retrieving and burying the dead at the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. From here, the novel ranges back to Kien's youth and the pains of adolescent love, and moves forward to his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to
The Ha-Ha
Dave King · 360 pages
Howard Kapostash has not spoken in thirty years. The small repertory of gestures and simple sounds that he uses to communicate lead most people to assume he is disturbed. No one understands that Howard is still the same man he was before his tragic injury. But when he agrees to help an old girlfriend by opening his home to her nine-year-old son, the presence of this nervous, resourceful boy in his
The Ninth Configuration
William Peter Blatty · 152 pages
In an experimental government center for troubled Vietnam veterans, the inmates run the asylum. One works on an adaptation of Shakespeare--for dogs. Another fancies himself a caped superhero. Still others masquerade as frogmen, nurses, nuns, pirates, doctors. Yet Colonel Vincent Kane, the psychiatrist in charge, eyes all with a stoic reserve. Maybe too stoic: there's a mystery here. And its final
Gods Go Begging
Alfredo Vea · 320 pages
"Jesse Pasadoble, a former infantry soldier who served his country with honor and courage, is now a defense attorney living in San Francisco. It was in Vietnam that Jesse learned to "hate death and to develop an almost anguished love of the living" during a horrific siege in which he should have died but didn't. For Jesse, the battle still rages: in his tortured memories; in the gang wars that ar
Hystopia
David Means · 336 pages
"By the early 1970s, President John F. Kennedy has survived several assassination attempts and--martyred, heroic--is now in his third term. Twenty-two-year-old Eugene Allen returns home from his tour of duty in Vietnam and begins to write a war novel--a book echoing Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five--about veterans who have their battlefield experiences "enfolded," wiped from their memories through
The Pugilist at Rest
Thom Jones · 240 pages
14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien · 256 pages
*The Things They Carried* (1990) is a collection of linked short stories by American novelist Tim O'Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. His third book about the war, it is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division.
Music of the Ghosts
Vaddey Ratner · 446 pages
Leaving the safety of America, Teera returns to Cambodia for the first time since her harrowing escape as a child refugee. She carries a letter from a man who mysteriously signs himself as "the Old Musician" and claims to have known her father in the Khmer Rouge prison where he disappeared twenty-five years ago. Arriving in Phnom Penh, Teera finds a society still in turmoil, where perpetrators and
Keeping Watch
Laurie R. King · 383 pages
Allen Carmichael came back from Vietnam a lifetime ago--but only now was he ready to return home. For years, he’s lived on the fringes of the law, using a soldier’s skills to keep watch over those too young to defend themselves. Some consider him nothing but a kidnapper for hire--the best in the business; others call him a hero. His specialty has been rescuing children from abusive parents and esc
The Time In Between
David Bergen · 288 pages
When their father leaves his B.C. home and travels back to Vietnam where he fought years earlier, a brother and sister follow him.
Machine Dreams
Jayne Anne Phillips · 331 pages
The story of the Hampsons--Mitch, Jean, Danner, and Billy--from the Depression through the Vietnam War.
Smoky Joe's Cafe
Bryce Courtenay · 241 pages
Thommo and the surviving members of his platoon return from the Vietnam War to an Australia that regards them as mercenaries guilty of war crimes. Suffering from physical and mental problems, they band together to plot revenge.
House Made of Dawn
N. Scott Momaday · 198 pages
This widely acclaimed novel tells the story of a young American Indian struggling to reconcile the traditional ways of his people with the demands of the twentieth century. Abel was raised to heed the voices of the land, the changes of the seasons, and the lessons taught by peyote. But once he returned from a foreign war and became exposed to the temptations of the wider world, Abel became a man l
Paco's Story
Larry Heinemann · 209 pages
Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of wha
After the Fire, a Still Small Voice
Evie Wyld
Set in the haunting landscape of eastern Australia, this is a stunningly accomplished debut novel about the inescapable past: the ineffable ties of family, the wars fought by fathers and sons, and what goes unsaid.After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank drives out to a shack by the ocean that he had last visited as a teenager. There, among the sugarcane and sand dunes, he struggles to reb
Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann · 349 pages
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly in
The Sentimentalists
Johanna Skibsrud · 216 pages
"Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel connects the flooding of an Ontario town, the Vietnam War, a trailer in North Dakota and an unfinished boat in Maine. Parsing family history, worn childhood memories, and the palimpsest of old misunderstandings, Skibsrud's narrator maps her father's past. Napoleon Haskell lives with Henry in the town of Casablanca, Ontario, on the shores of a man-made lake beneath
The Life We Bury
Allen Eskens · 303 pages
"An ordinary writing assignment for a college English class brings Joe face-to-face with a dying Vietnam veteran, who is also a convicted murderer."--
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong · 256 pages
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once